I've been searching everywhere the last few days to find out if its necessary to defrag an SSD and I've come to the conclusion that not only is it unecessary but it can also have a negative effect on the lifespan.

I've only had my SSD a few days but after benchmarking today I noticed considerable drop in sequential write speeds but after using the SSD optimiser the benchmark results were better than when I tested it out of the box

I noticed today that write speeds had dropped from the 160MB/s region to 120-130MB/s region. I got a bit annoyed by that and found out after some research that its perfectly normal for an SSD to slow down with regards to write speeds.

Then I found Diskeeper and ran CrystalMark again, the results are in the second image

Oh, you edited your post since I saw it and added the link to the software.

I was basically just agreeing/confirming what you had said about defragging.

Yeah, sorry about that. I pressed enter and posted before finishing what I was typing.

This really does work though

Load up Diskeeper and along the top are a bunch of icons. The sixth icon across is the SSD Volumes icon, click this and ensure the check box in the next window is ticked. After that click the 'Analyze' icon on the left of the display.

It will take some time to analyze/optimize, took about 15 minutes for me.Edited by Joeking78 - 3/16/09 at 12:15pm

The 'Consolidate Free Space mode' is designed with SSD's in mind. I've just used it to defrag my SSD from 1.7% fragmentation to 0%.

For those worried about wear on SSD drives check the quote below which can be found on the PerfectDisk website

"There are also concerns about wear. That is, flash has the potential to wear out after tens (or hundreds) of thousands of write cycles.

This characterization, however, is too simplistic. A flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles, for example, can write 100,000 times to every single (memory) cell within the device. In other words, the device doesn't write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. This is achieved through wear leveling which is carried out by the SSD's controller.

This would make it virtually impossible to wear out a flash chip. A pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn't reach the theoretical write limit."

After defragmenting with PerfectDisk I use Diskeeper 2009 Pro to optimise the SSD. Again the HyperFast utility with Diskeeper is designed for SSD's.

When I used Diskeeper HyperFast to analyze the drive it found 1271 low performing free spaces with "little or no defragmentation" and after the optimization it reduced those 1271 low performing free spaces to 859.

After running PerfectDisk 10 'Consolidate Free Space mode' to 0% defragmentation I then ran Diskeeper Hyperfast again. This time it reduced the low performing spaces to just 84.Edited by Joeking78 - 3/16/09 at 5:20pm